COMING INTO ITS OWN

Football at Harvard came into its own on Saturday. Although it seems entirely superfluous to point this out after everyone who has followed the football team knows that Harvard now need never again smile apologetically when the gridiron sport is mentioned, though everyone gets slightly sick at talk of a moral victory, nevertheless it would be carrying indifference several steps too far to overlook what did happen in the Baltimore Municipal Stadium.

Certainly the team did not play a perfect game, but as Dick Harlow was quoted as saying in the dressing room, "When Harvard is distinctly disappointed about a tie" it indicates how far down the long hard trail, of a successful, completely amateur team, the Crimson has traveled. Navy, admittedly one of the strongest teams in the East was fought on even or better terms throughout the afternoon, and yet the team was not ready to call it quits for the rest of the season on the basis of that showing. Nor did the final result have any of the surprise clement that the Princeton tie of last year did. In short, the defeatist atmosphere is gone, and thought of that elusive major victory is now so near that it no longer has the aura of mystery and distance that it once had.

Three years of patient work on the part of Dick Harlow and the players with whom he has labored have been responsible for this great change, and it has become almost commonplace to bestow the credit where it belongs without any regard for the intensely hard fight the coaches have had these few years. Lest anyone think complacently about Harvard's success on the gridiron this year as something bound to come in the normal course of events, let him remember the spirit that prevailed at Soldiers Field three short years ago.